More Like This

Preview

Billy Graham’s New England crusade was an important watershed in the history of Boston’s evangelical Protestants. It marked not only a culmination of several decades of revivalistic efforts, but signaled a new level of social visibility and acceptance for the city’s fundamentalists, increasingly self-identified as more socially engaged “new evangelicals”. Graham’s Boston crusade, with its broadly international agenda for revival, also illustrates the gradual detachment of conservative evangelicals from their urban setting. Local attachments to Boston were clearly secondary to a larger...

Billy Graham’s New England crusade was an important watershed in the history of Boston’s evangelical Protestants. It marked not only a culmination of several decades of revivalistic efforts, but signaled a new level of social visibility and acceptance for the city’s fundamentalists, increasingly self-identified as more socially engaged “new evangelicals”. Graham’s Boston crusade, with its broadly international agenda for revival, also illustrates the gradual detachment of conservative evangelicals from their urban setting. Local attachments to Boston were clearly secondary to a larger symbolic program for national salvation, in which England served as a colorful mythical backdrop to a campaign for spiritual rather than political salvation.